Embodiments of the present invention generally relate wide field-of-view, high resolution imaging devices. More specifically, certain embodiments relate to Talbot imaging (Ti) devices and Ti systems for wide field-of-view, high-resolution bright field and fluorescence imaging used in areas such as, for example, microscopy and photography.
Optical microscopy is a important tool used in biological and clinical research. The design of optical microscopy has changed very little until a recent effort to miniaturize the microscope on an imaging sensor. Examples of recent developments in on-chip microscopes can be found in Coskun, A. F., Sencan, I., Su, T. W., and Ozcan, A., “Wide-field lensless fluorescent microscopy using a tapered fiber-optic faceplate on a chip,” Analyst (2011) (“Coskun”); Cui, X. Q., Lee, L. M., Heng, X., Zhong, W. W., Sternberg, P. W., Psaltis, D., and Yang, C. H., “Lensless high-resolution on-chip optofluidic microscopes for Caenorhabditis elegans and cell imaging,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105, pp. 10670-10675 (2008); Heng, X., Erickson, D., Baugh, L. R., Yaqoob, Z., Sternberg, P. W., Psaltis, D. and Yang, C. H., “Optofluidic microscopy—a method for implementing a high resolution optical microscope on a chip,” Lab on a Chip 6, pp. 1274-1276 (2006); Pang, S., Cui, X. Q., DeModena, J., Wang, Y. M., Sternberg, P., and Yang, C. H. “Implementation of a color-capable optofluidic microscope on a RGB CMOS color sensor chip substrate,” Lab on a Chip 10, pp. 411-414 (2010); and Zheng, G. A., Lee, S. A., Yang, S., and Yang, C. H., “Sub-pixel resolving optofluidic microscope for on-chip cell imaging,” Lab on a Chip 10, pp. 3125-3129 (2010), which are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety for all purposes.
Fluorescence is an important optical readout mode in microscopy because it can be much more sensitive and specific than absorbance and reflectance, as discussed in Tsien, R. Y., Ernst, L., and Waggoner, A., “Fluorophores for Confocal Microscopy: Photophysics and Photochemistry,” Handbook Of Biological Confocal Microscopy, pp. 338-352 (2006), which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety for all purposes. Many on-chip microscopes cannot achieve the optical resolution in fluorescence imaging comparable to that achievable by a convention microscope.